“ ‘[I]f the bones are found to be yellow like wax, that is the first sign that the Lord has glorified the righteous deceased; and if they are found to be not yellow but black, it means that the Lord has not deemed him worthy of his glory—that is how it is on Athos, a great place, where Orthodoxy from of old has been preserved inviolate and in shining purity.’. . .”

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 1990.